Green Cover

‘Green cover’ refers to a broad range of strategies to integrate green, permeable and reflective surfaces into cities and towns, which are home to 89 per cent of our population.

Urban surface temperatures can be 10°C to 20°C higher than in the air temperatures because buildings, roads and other hard surfaces absorb and store heat. High temperatures, due to climate change, will further intensify the impacts of urban heat.

Unlike hard surfaces, trees and vegetation (sometimes called green infrastructure) reflect heat, and they cool and clean the air by evapotranspiration. Other benefits are better health and well being for urban-dwellers, more biodiversity and wildlife, and regulation of localised flooding.

Types of urban green cover include bushland, private and community gardens, parks, greenways, habitat corridors, street trees, roof gardens and plant-covered walls, as well as reflective and permeable walls, pavements and other surfaces. Protecting local green spaces, designing eco-friendly buildings and creating urban networks of green space can help to minimise the impacts of urban heat in our cities and towns.

Green cover resources

The NSW Government has produced Technical Guidelines for Urban Green Cover in NSW to provide practical advice on best practice. The purpose of these guidelines is to increase the resilience of NSW settlements and communities to climate change, specifically to increasing temperatures in urban settings.

The Green Cover Demonstration Project, by the Office of Environment and Heritage (OEH) in collaboration with the NSW Government Architect’s Office, showcases leading landscape design principles for urban green cover.

Examples of urban green cover

Green and cool roofs have surfaces that are vegetated, light coloured or reflective surfaces.

Green walls are vegetated systems grown on the vertical walls of a building.

Green streets include shade canopy, mass-planted understoreys, bioswales and median plantings, as well as permeable and reflective surfaces on roads, pavements and car parks.

Green urban open spaces include canopy trees and shaded areas in parks, amenities and on cycleways and footpaths, as well as bioswales, rain gardens, soft-landscaped detention basins or dechannelisation of concrete culverts.

Urban Greening Masterclass - A collaboration between 202020 Vision and OEH to run a series of urban-greening masterclasses for council representatives to meet, share knowledge and increase collaboration on urban green cover projects.

Do you want to see how climate change will affect your region?

This site works best when viewed in a modern browser, for instance Internet Explorer 11 or latest versions of Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox.

The Adapt NSW site now has an interactive map that allows you to see how climate change is projected to affect your region. You can look at the high resolution grid maps which display climate change at 10km scale or the regional maps which provide a summary for your region. Click through the variables and different time periods to see how the climate is projected to change for your region.

Are you looking for climate change data?

For the first time, the NSW and ACT Regional Climate Model (NARCLiM) allows you access to high resolution climate change data. This data is in a format that can be inputted directly into most biophysical models. You can choose the variable, time period and location of the data you want to download. The data portal provides instructions on how to download the data.

Do you want to learn more about climate change?

The About Climate Change tab provides a one stop shop for information on how and why our climate is changing. There is information to help understand the causes of climate change, climate change modelling, evidence of climate change today and how NSW is responding to the challenge.

Do you want to know how to adapt to climate change?

Climate change projections help us to understand how climate change is going to impact us. We then need to know how to adapt to those impacts. Adapting to climate change provides information on what adaptation is, sector specific issues and responses, and the process you can go through to understand and respond to the risks to and vulnerabilities of your services, assets and community from climate change.